Participants’ overall consensus on the day was that
there is no consensus, whether here in Ireland or indeed the UK, over what
constitutes “best practice” in the realm of library organisational structure
and, crucially, the status of subject/liaison librarianship.

Hoodless and Pinfield investigated
this idea by trying to find out about the actual state of library
organisational structures and management practices. They did this by means of
conducting eleven semi-structured interviews with senior library managers from a
range of different UK based higher education institutions. Their maximum
variation sampling approach aimed to cover as broad a spectrum of perspectives and
practices as possible.

Before highlighting the results of Hoodless’s and
Pinfield’s study, it makes sense to identify the typical responsibilities
of the traditional academic liaison librarian. They include, among other
things, development, management and delivery of information literacy training
for their constituent library users. Linking up with appropriate staff and students
to maintain awareness of new research and teaching in their subject areas, as
well as developing and fulfilling potential information needs. Liaison
librarians also tend to manage information resources budgets pertaining to
their allocated subject fields.

Debbie
Morrow contends that effective embeddedness is the key ingredient to successful
liaison librarianship: “My responsibility became to explore and nurture
relationships within my liaison departments, and per chance to become what Olivia
Olivares has aptly described as “sufficiently embedded.”

An example of a classic, subject-based liaison support
structure is UCC Library

Hoodless and Pinfield learnt through their inquiries
that, increasingly, libraries are replacing subject-based teams for functional
teams. However, views on this were divided along the lines of actual current or
anticipated practice: libraries that will/have adopt(ed) the functional
approach see this very much as the way forward; libraries that maintain, and
intend to maintain into the future, the subject-based model were unconvinced of
the efficacy of functional teams.

Essentially, the following opposing drivers for both,
functional and subject-based, library structures were identified (see Hoodless
and Pinfield, 2016, p.12):

“The First Rung on the Ladder: Applications, interviews and first experiences as a New Professional” #npdi16.

Presentations and panel discussion with experienced librarians from a variety of fields.

In writing pat two I want to take this opportunity to thank the NPDI Team and expert panel for giving students and new library and info pro’s the chance to gain insight into how our library leaders handle the complex nature that is recruitment.
Having the opportunity to reach out and be given the space to verify what you are doing, and be reassured you are doing it correctly is a great boost when job hunting.
The enthusiasm and support shown to the audience that day was second to none, job hunting can be a lonely place at times and it is good to know people are looking out for you.
In order of appearance the following advice was presented:

Lorna Dodd, Maynooth University.
In all interview situations, people being interviewed forget that the interviewees are human. We show very little of ourselves other than what we have been asked and how each experience relates to our C.V. and the job description. In some cases, the interviewees want to see a potential colleague, someone they can imagine having a cup of tea with in the canteen. In doing this you need to show your best self, you can shine in 30 minutes. One helpful tip, remember your social media accounts, don’t go posting any information about an interview before or after.
Shelia Kelly, Dublin City Library & Archive.
One of the many important messages I took away from npdi16 was the importance of practising your interview, talking out your experiences. This creates your story, and how this story matches the job description and the person the panel require. Having to talk out your examples, the positive and negative to others lets you see the gaps in your story, the pieces that don’t add up. It also gives you a confidence when telling your story to the panel, as the saying goes, practice makes perfect (until nerves kick in).

Marie O’Neill, Dublin Business School.
To students currently doing their capstone or thesis, have an aim in mind to get it published, this will help you stand out. If you find that there are gaps between jobs, always upskill, always be learning and adding to your CPD. At interview stage show the panel you have bought into the organisations ethos and culture, make them understand how you value and appreciate this element. Marie believes that there should be a formal mentoring network set up, where librarians can register to mentor graduates/early career librarians as required. Marie has the most amazing ideas and I do hope they become a reality, the one I think we really need is a dedicated jobs fair for LIS professionals, because there are many companies and organisations out there, including recruitment companies that disregard our skills because they only see “the librarian in the library”.

Catriona Sharkey, Ernest and Young.
Know the opportunity the job will give you, and give it your all. Do your homework, know the organisation, the ethos of the library, their strategic plan the annual report. You name it, know it as Catriona states this is “Forensic research”. Study the job description this is generally going to be the questions you are going to be asked, test yourself to prepare yourself.
The discussion was mainly aimed at two areas, social media and the final question you are asked in an interview “Do you have any questions”?
Social media is always a mine field, just be careful and always think that potential employers are viewing it to see your interests and hobbies. A lot of librarians use “opinions are my own” in their bio, which can be useful.

Do you have any questions? The advice given is to be aware of the context, if you’re not sure about asking it, don’t ask it. One of the panel suggested, any queries you have email the point of contact you have from HR. Marie also pointed out to use this time at the end as an opportunity to thank the panel for their time and the opportunity to be interviewed, which I think is a fabulous way to end any interview.

9 Dec 2016

Guest post by Siobhan McGuinness Siobhan has presented at library conferences such as ASL and CDG. In addition, she enjoys writing blog posts for library organisations.

The team that run New Professionals Day Ireland deliver very important and relevant events for New Professionals. The focus this year being “Applications, Interviews & First Experiences of New Professionals”. The job hunt is tough, something akin to the hunger games in my experience which of course is played out in my mind, not reality.

Library and Information Professionals know they have a wide range of skills, not all of those skills get the proper use in college. You are thought the theory and the practice yet with only a limited amount of experience when you graduate, it is difficult to secure that first job.

If you know what you want during the college term, really dedicate your time to finding out the sector or skill you wish to advance in and you will succeed. Like Caroline Rowan our first speaker, she carefully planned where she wished to see herself, a medical librarian. The advice Caroline gives is one of an action plan, take a step back, look at where you see yourself, think about the plan ahead. When applying for jobs that are short term contracts always ask yourself where will this job take me on my long-term goal? Have these answers ready before you apply.

The application is a long and tedious road, and they are all different. Be aware of the different formats, inform yourself of things like Garda vetting, all the addresses you lived in will need to be identified. Different jobs require different CV’s, so be prepared to rewrite everything. Have that master CV, it will help you in the long run.

The next step is the interview, this is a huge pat on the back. It means your CV works and is what the organisation wanted. Now it is for you to prepare, hold on to the job descriptions as this is vital information to you. Prepare yourself more, forearmed is forewarned as they say. Email (very nicely) to the HR personnel and ask them the interview process, information like how many will be on the panel and who they are, what type of interview will it be?

Next up was the first of four lighting presentations, Gary LaCumbre led the way with his presentation “The elusive middle ground: over qualified and under experienced”. This is where I sit, in nearly all my interviews the lack of actual library experience is always a disadvantage to me. It is disheartening to have a Master’s degree and still find yourself applying for jobs at an entry level, because you don’t have the necessary experience. It is even more difficult to be told that you are over qualified for posts, because the organisation do not accept qualified professionals at entry level posts. Gary says, no matter what post you are successful in always make sure you get involved with other projects, maximise your skillset so that when you find yourself once again job searching you “have travelled outside of your own job description”. A wonderful presentation and very heart-warming for those of us who are constantly searching.

Niall O’Brien followed with “Learning at the Information desk”. Here Niall teaches us to build a relationship with your users, get to know them, their interests. In essence even though you are doing a “job” you are doing the job you love so let that show when dealing with users, this is such an important message and one that we often forget, so thank you Niall. While you build this relationship, you teach them how to answer their own research queries, you give them the tools. Assess how you interact with your users, does the information desk look like a wall, a barrier, or is it a welcoming space an informal space that makes the user comfortable. Always make the experience something that the user will use and learn from.

Anita Cooper began her presentation with the fab title “A librarian gets into a taxi…and guess what happens next? Anita tells us the story of how in the most unexpected circumstances she secured an internship with Dublin Business School Library, with the lovely Marie O’Neill. Now that she has graduated and is on her search to secure a library job, she says to keep an open mind. You need to always believe that when you are in the right place at the right time things do happen. Anita says if her husband had not met Marie and told her the story of the difficult choice Anita was making regarding changing careers and becoming a librarian. If happenstance had not occurred she would hate to think where she would have ended up, or even worse abandoned her dreams. Don’t lose faith, we all know this is what we want so keep going, because we will get there.

Lastly, we have Jesse Waters “My first year out of Library School” these amazing achievements in just one year goes to show that dedication and drive really does pay off. Jesse says in order to keep your mental health healthy in between jobs, job searching and the mountain of rejections, is to concentrate on your Continuing Professional Development. Look for seminars and conferences that you can present at, be a lightning talk or a poster presentation it helps you focus on your profession, and reminds you that you love what you are doing. While looking after your mental health, network and this keeps you in touch with everyone, opportunities arise from these meet up’s.

The high standard of presentations at npdi16 was incredible, to all of the brand-new, new library and informational professionals keep doing what you are doing because it will stand to you. All you need is patience and time, just remember to have fun along the way!

Part two can be read here .A Storify of the event has been created and can be seen here

5 Dec 2016

The inaugural UCC Library Seminar took place on Tuesday,
November 15th, and was possibly the most thought provoking library event I have
attended this year. It focused on User Experience and on new ways of thinking
about library services. All four speakers posed controversial questions,
rattled a few cages, and altogether made us re-assess how we think about what libraries
do and who our users are.

The opening talk, entitled ‘Invisible users:
Libraries and the messy practices of academia’ was by Donna Lanclos, Associate
Professor for Anthropological Research at Atkins Library, in the University of
North Carolina Charlotte. Donna has carried out ethnographic research on user
experience in the libraries of U.S. and European universities, asking users to
map their activity in order to understand where learning occurs during their
busy lives, and what their digital practices are. An interesting project called
‘A day in the life’ involved students and academics from several U.S. and
European colleges tweeting about where they were, what they were doing and how
they felt at various times of the day. The results of these mapping and ‘day in
the life’ projects paint a fascinating picture of where students learn, how
they use digital resources in their learning, and where the library fits into
all of that. The first lesson from these projects is that there is no such
thing as ‘invisible users’. They are far from invisible: we are simply not
looking in the right places, because libraries are just one of the possible
learning spaces they use. In other words, libraries must stop thinking about
their ‘users’ and start trying to understand their communities. The second
lesson is that students and researchers in similar institutions in the Western
world are not that different from one another: they tend to look for spaces
with access to food and good coffee, wifi, easy parking and quiet to study. Their
learning spaces tend to be places where they can also meet friends, or that are
close to their child’s crèche, or that have some other social/ convenience
aspect, and they often use public transport as a learning space –particularly
if they live in a noisy student apartment or they have children at home who
distract them from their study. Rather than replicating UX studies that have
already been done elsewhere, we should learn from them and apply their
conclusions to our own libraries, trying out initiatives but avoiding ‘solutionism’,
as there are often no tidy solutions to the messy complexity of academic lives.
Donna cautioned against using the results of these studies as a means of
fuelling the metrics-based culture so prevalent in our institutions. Instead,
she called for a richer, more qualitative narrative, which makes clear the
contribution of academic libraries to the well being of our communities,
without reducing it to simply a matter of numbers.

The second talk, entitled ‘Consciously Connecting: a
snapshot of CIT Library initiatives enriching the User Experience’, was by Jean Ricken, Institute Librarian at the Cork Institute of Technology. Jean discussed
new initiatives aimed at providing a more consistent and relevant library
service across all different campuses of CIT, which includes students at the
Marine Institute who may be literally at sea when trying to access library
resources. She talked us through the re-design of the CIT library website, and
provided ideas for engaging students with the library site such as an online
‘scavenger hunt’ with a ‘golden ticket’ prize. Jean also talked about how to
solve signage issues [colour coding resources and linking to a strong logo],
tackle noise problems in the library when there is little budget for it [remove
partitions between desks] and told us that creating bookable spaces for group
study has been extremely successful. As well as re-designing the library
website and the physical spaces, CIT libraries also set about re-thinking their
library induction, and collaborated with the broader institution in the Good
Start induction programme to engage first year students with the Library.
Jean’s main message was that communicating the library’s user experience plans
to colleagues outside the library can bring substantial benefits, both by
making the wider academic community aware of what the library can offer, and by
engaging students with the library.

After a lovely lunch break with delicious food and a tour of
the fabulous Boole library, the afternoon started with Matt Borg’s talk, ‘A
matter of perspective. User Experience, Libraries, Human Centred Design and You’.
Matt is Senior Librarian and Solution Expert at Ex Libris in Sheffield, and his
talk analysed how a change in perspective can have a large impact on library
services. He illustrated this by looking at the experience of H-Day, September
3rd 1967, when the Swedish changed the side of the road on which they drove.
Although there was extensive planning for the event, with education, extensive
media campaigns and preparation for possible problems, the planning process did
not take into account how the change would affect entire journeys, and as a
result people got lost: the planners had not seen the event through the eyes of
road users. Matt emphasised that we as librarians are not our users: we don’t
spend as much time in the library itself as they do, and therefore we don’t
know enough about their experience of it. Library surveys are usually filled in
by experienced users, and don’t tell us how the average user feels about the
service. Matt discussed a number of UX techniques such as behavioural maps, visitors
and residents diagrams, cognitive maps, interviews, usability testing, graffiti
walls, love/ breakup letters, and touchstone tours that can provide a glimpse
of the users’ perspectives. However, he
also noted that these techniques can also lead to bad UX studies, and pointed
out how design often fails to take into account real-life use. Perhaps the most
egregious example of this was the ‘Too cool to do drugs’ pencils used in an
anti-drugs campaign which, when sharpened, could be made to say ‘cool to do
drugs’. Clearly, the designers had not sharpened their own pencils when
planning the campaign! Matt’s main conclusion was that libraries are about
connecting people with resources, and human-centred design can help deliver a more
meaningful service that caters to the needs of our communities.

The final talk of the day was by Fiona Greig, Head of
eStrategy & Resources at the University of Surrey Library. Entitled What
does a future oriented library look like in terms of staff roles, flexibility
and adaptability?, Fiona’s talk made some controversial statements which at
times left us feeling uncomfortable, yet knowing that those questions need to
be asked. She started by pointing out that, although online resources attract
the highest percentage of traffic in most libraries, this is rarely reflected
in staff allocation. Fiona advocated strongly for streamlining library
operations to provide excellent online service, so that expert staff can then
be freed up to focus on making the unique collections of the library available
digitally, and on providing the type of training and research support that
requires face-to-face contact. Fiona believes that physical collections of
contemporary material must ‘earn their keep’ in order to justify their space on
the shelves, and that anything that can be offered in digital form successfully
should be. She called on library vendors to make their data open and available
for mining, in order to improve the searchability of electronic resources, and
she also highlighted the need for leadership from library management to
negotiate forcefully with vendors for improved offerings in digital form.
Finally, she highlighted the need for flexible and adaptable staff, calling on
library leaders to foster a culture of adaptability, encourage staff to branch
out into new areas and promote meaningful professional development.

These are the main points that stayed with me at the end of
this first UCC Library annual seminar:

Libraries must stop thinking about users and start engaging
their whole communities.

We are about connecting people with resources, and sometimes
those resources can also be other people.

We are not our users, so in order to understand their needs
we have to step into their shoes.

We should focus on complementing what’s already available
online, rather than trying to replace it – we are not Google, but we can be
something else equally necessary.

Librarians must be flexible and adaptable, and library
leaders should foster these qualities in their employees.

I would like to thank the entire UCC library team involved
in organising this seminar – they thought of everything, including providing
phone chargers for attendees [impressive or what?]. I am also really looking
forward to next year’s!

25 Nov 2016

Guest post by Claire McGuinness, assistant professor in the School of Information & Communication Studies, UCD.Claire
has a long-held interest in information and digital literacies, new
media, and the role of the teaching librarian. In this post, she
examines filter bubbles, fake news and the effect of social media in the
“post-truth society” and asks whether librarians have a responsibility
to their users and students to point out where the line between fact and
fiction has been blurred.

Depending on your perspective, the social media chickens have been either coming home to roost, or learning to soar recently. For information professionals, these are fascinating times. While the world has been contemplating the unprecedented results of the Brexit referendum in June and the recent US Presidential election, the simmering debate around the influence of social networking sites such as Facebook on the outcomes of elections and referendums has reached boiling point over the past few weeks. The outcome in both cases, which was the opposite to what was predicted by multiple polls, has led to suggestions that the polling systems seriously underestimated a number of factors, including the “power of alt-right news sources and smaller conservative sites that largely rely on Facebook to reach an audience” (Solon, 2016), and failed to take into account the deep polarisation that has been evident on social media sites, in particular. In the weeks since the US Presidential election, social media has been under the microscope, and there has been a flood of articles, polemics and opinion pieces, signalling varying degrees of concern about the apparent blurring of the lines between social media sites and traditional news channels, and the perceived effect that this has had – and may yet have - on national and global politics. Although emotions have been running high, particularly in the wake of the bitterly fought US campaign, it is helpful to sift through the hyperbole, and break down the key arguments that are shaping the discussion. What are the main issues emerging from this debate – and why do they concern us?

Firstly, that the number of people who now consume news primarily via social media sites rather than traditional, editorialised media channels is increasing exponentially, with many turning directly to sites such as Twitter, Reddit and Facebook to keep up to date with current affairs. There does appear to be some evidence for this, although traditional channels have not been entirely jettisoned – for example, the most recent annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that 52% of Irish consumers now get their news from social media sites (BAI, 2016), while a Pew Research Center report on news consumption across social media platforms in 2016 found that a 62% majority of US adults also turn to social media for their news (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016). When broken down to examine specific sites, results showed that 66% of Facebook users get news on the site, while 59% of Twitter users get news on Twitter. Context is important for findings such as these – for example, the Reuters study also confirmed that TV is still the most popular news source in Ireland, while the Pew study showed that only 18% of respondents get news “often” from social media, while the demographics point to a primarily white, young and well-educated population who consume news in this way. However, caveats notwithstanding, the trend is notable and cannot be ignored.

Secondly, that the circulation of “fake news” items on social media sites has had a disproportionate effect on the outcomes of the US election and Brexit referendum. This point has driven much of the recent media discussion, although in the wake of the US election result Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly rejected the argument, referring to it as a “pretty crazy idea” (Shahani, 2016). Nonetheless, shortly after this, both Facebook and Google announced that they will be making changes to try to restrict the spread of fake news, in Facebook’s case by banning fake news sites from using its Facebook Audience Network (Murdock, 2016). While it is difficult to measure the actual effect of fake news on voter behaviour, there is certainly a lot of uncertainty and unease around this issue.

A wider perspective is the suggestion that fact-checking and “truth” in news items circulated via social media is now considered to be less important than content which appeals to the emotions, generates “clicks,” and can be monetized. It is no coincidence that “post-truth,” which encapsulates this concept, has been declared by Oxford Dictionaries as its international word of the year (Flood, 2016), its usage having spiked during the events of 2016. In exploring the impact of this trend on journalism, Declan Lawn in the Irish Times describes the “post-factual society” not as a society where facts no longer exist, but rather “a society where they exist, but don’t matter.” This, he argues, has had a profoundly damaging effect on journalistic practice, as sticking to the facts no longer produces the impact that it used to.

Alongside the concerns about misleading information and clickbait, is the more general sense that users of social media are shielded from content that does not chime with their own views, while links, videos and articles that reinforce their beliefs and preferences are channelled towards them in a continual stream. This is known as the Filter Bubble effect: “The more we click, like and share stuff that resonates with our own world views, the more Facebook feeds us with similar posts” (Solon, 2016). “Filter Bubble” was coined in 2011 by Eli Pariser in his book of the same name. Spurred on by concerns about the potentially reductive effects of personalised search, and predictive algorithms that customise social media content streams to satisfy user preferences (and, naturally, encourage more lucrative “clicking”), he raised a number of flags: to quote a passage from the book,

“The new generation of Internet filters looks at the things you seem to like – the actual things you’ve done or the things people like you like – and tries to extrapolate. They are predictive engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are, and what you’ll do and want next” (p.9).

This, he argues, has fundamentally transformed the ways in which people consume information, as they are exposed less and less to ideas that oppose or challenge their own worldviews. Instead, through interacting only with content that reinforces their existing beliefs, they become trapped in this reverberating, digital echo chamber that serves only to strengthen their convictions, and irrevocably narrow their perspective on the world. Some media reports claim that it was this “red” and “blue” filter bubble effect that was the defining story of the US election; one piece in the Guardian newspaper in the UK even sought to investigate the effect, albeit in a spurious way, by asking five conservative-leaning and five liberal-leaning US voters to deliberately restrict their social media interactions to a stream (created by the journalists for the purpose) containing items that opposed their views (Wong, Levin & Solon, 2016). Results were predictably mixed, with some claiming more influence than others. In reality, it is a difficult claim to prove, and it also raises questions about individual agency – surely people have always “clicked” on sources that fit their worldview, and avoided others, no matter the medium? The recognised cognitive effect of confirmation bias supports this; it refers to people’s tendency to actively search out information that confirms what they already believe, and to avoid or reject information that conflicts with those beliefs. It seems that the speed and reach of social media has amplified this effect, and raised it to public consciousness in the wake of the election and the earlier referendum.

Whose responsibility?

All of these issues have inevitably turned the spotlight towards the social media companies, and what their role should be. Do they, for example, have a moral responsibility to moderate content, to check facts, and to ensure that their users are fed a balanced diet of information? This is a tricky argument, as the companies tend not to define themselves as “media organisations” in the traditional sense, but rather as technology neutral platforms, which are not bound by editorial control. Of course, the counter-argument to this is that they do, of course, already exert some form of editorial control by setting rules and standards about what is acceptable and permitted content – the recent furore over the apparent removal of breastfeeding photographs on Facebook confirms this. And even if they are eventually defined as media organisations, how then are the boundaries between blocking or removing unacceptable content, and censorship to be drawn? These are big questions, with no easy answers.

However, while these issues have been thrown into brilliant relief by the events leading up to November 8th, they are not exactly new to those of us who have been walking the information and digital literacy path for the past decade and more. We already know that the bedrock of the work that we do is the inculcation of a healthy kind of information scepticism in our students - or “crap detection,” as it is more colloquially known. Social media has been moving the goalposts since the mid-2000s, and “new” literacies such as those identified by Howard Rheingold (2010) have emerged; for example, attention; network awareness; critical consumption, amongst others. This is embedded in all of the frameworks and models that we use to inform our approach, most recently in the ACRL Framework: “Authority is Constructed and Contextual.”

As an information professional and long-time teacher of information and digital literacy, the public debate on the potential effects of social media is one of the most heart-thumping, genuinely thrilling moments in a more than a decade of working with undergraduates and future library professionals – in a strange way, it feels like a coming of age. We know this stuff. We knew what was coming down the line. We understand that education, education, education is the key. But it is also exciting because it demands that we re-appraise our role, and reflect deeply on what it is we are charged to do. It asks that we confront the issue of our responsibility towards our students in light of our growing awareness of the effects of social media – or consider whether it is our responsibility at all?

Because I am a teacher, I tend to frame these issues in terms of how I could, or should, address them in my modules. Following the US election, a story emerged about Melissa Zimdars, a communications professor in Massachusetts, who took the approach of compiling a list of misleading or questionable news organisations in a Google Doc of "False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical ‘News' Sources” to distribute to students in her communications module (Dreid, 2016). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the list was shared and quickly went viral, followed by widespread questioning of the inclusion criteria that determined the sites on the list, as well as concerns about potential legal action from the site owners. That’s one way of addressing it; a top-down approach. However, while an interesting idea, it is far from certain that maintaining a register of questionable resources can really solve this problem; for me, this is the equivalent of placing a finger in the crack in the dam. You can hold back the deluge only for so long. My instinct has always been to turn the responsibility over to the students, although I try to equip them with the tools to make reasonable judgements. Since introducing a revamped Digital Literacy module for undergraduates in 2012, I have increasingly been aware of a new tone creeping into my classes; often, I seem to find myself exhorting my students to Be Alert! See how you are being manipulated! Understand that YOU are the product! Know what clues to look for, and avoid pitfalls! Always check the facts! These exhortations are typically grounded in explorations of digital footprints, online reputation management and cybersecurity. I explain that as individuals, they must decide for themselves where they stand on these issues, and what they are willing to accept. However, to do this in a balanced way seems challenging; I frequently feel like I am searching for that fine line between preaching, paranoia and common sense. I also wonder if I am somehow overstepping the mark?

The fallout from the social media furore has also led me to look again at the concepts of critical information literacy (CIL), or critical pedagogy in library instruction, which are rooted in the broader notion of the social justice work done by librarians. CIL “aims to understand how libraries participate in systems of oppression and find ways for librarians and students to intervene upon these systems” (Tewell, 2016). Its goal is to highlight inequalities and injustices with regard to information access, to ask students to consider the ramifications of these injustices and to explore what might be done to address them. This can be powerful and transformative practice. But like the social media issues discussed above, it does also ask us to reappraise our role as teaching librarians, and to question whether this is or should be our responsibility?

While I am not sure what the answer is, I apply the same reasoning as I have always done when advocating for information literacy: If not us – then who? I would be very interested in hearing other perspectives on this. It truly is an exciting time for information professionals.

11 Nov 2016

2016 is finally (and mercifully if I might frankly say so) drawing to a close, and I thought it’d be a sensible idea to direct you to some forthcoming librarian webinars that might be of interest to you too.

The covered themes include in date ascending list-order below: change-managing tactics and avoiding associates stresses, introducing the ‘kitchen classroom’ in the library for the purposes of Literacy instruction in the community, and running technology classes for public library patrons.

Three Steps to Thriving in ChaosThursday, 1st December, 19:00 – 20:00 GMT
The turbulence of current events increases stress, drains energy and reduces productivity. In this webinar you’ll learn three essential steps for not only surviving but thriving in the chaos.
As a result of participating in this session you will:
• Identify the three phases of change and how to manage them effectively.
• Discover how behaviour style impacts the change process.
• Apply three tools to increase your ability to thrive.

Culinary Literacy: A Library Recipe for Cooking Up Literacy and CommunityTuesday, 6th December, 20:00 – 21:00 GMT
Opening in 2014, the Free Library of Philadelphia's Culinary Literacy Center offered the country's first commercial-grade kitchen classroom in a library. It is revolutionizing the way Philadelphians think about food, nutrition, and literacy. The Center reaches to every corner of the community. It teaches math and science to kids through measuring and mixing, builds English language skills and nutrition education for non-native speakers, empowers adults with disabilities to cook with confidence, and much more. Hear how this innovative idea was transformed into reality through strategic community partnerships and institutional support. Learn how your library can start teaching community residents everything from butchering a goat to making a vegan stew, boosting literacy and nutritional health for all.

Technology Classes at Your LibraryWednesday, 7th December, 16:00 – 17:00 GMT
In the past three years, the Iowa City Public Library has tripled their patron involvement in technology classes taught by library staff, without increasing staff or budget. Technology is an ever changing landscape and classes are a great way to help patrons become savvier technology users. Learn how to grow interest in your library’s technology courses with strategies for assessment, marketing, and curriculum development.

1 Nov 2016

I asked a number of librarians, and those
from related fields, what they saw as the main SWOT(s) facing libraries and
librarians. Here are their replies below. I asked for one each, but librarians
being the helping profession we are some provided more than one. I decided to
use all that people supplied.

Consequently it is a rather long piece.

To make it a more manageable read I have
therefore grouped the individual replies into separate fields - so all
Strengths are together and so on for Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. If
you have any comments please leave them in the comments section below. It would
be good to get a library wide discussion on what faces our profession and our
thoughts on how equipped we are to cope with what faces us as we move forward
in a time of great and fast moving change.

Strengths

Our strength is our curiosity and need to learn.
Any new technology, trend or cultural shift, we are on it, finding out how it
works, what it is, what the advantages are, and sharing what we've learned.

The statistics completely juxtapose the
narrative around libraries; usage may be reducing but it is nevertheless HUGE.
People need and use libraries *all the frigging time*.

Passion - committed staff who believe in
what we do

Highly educated, motivated and impassioned
professionals

Strong emerging leaders and advocates

Strong values of equality in information and
access

Capable of harnessing new technology and
trends

Skilled at managing complex information in
any subject

Strong on community development

The resilience and adaptability that
libraries and librarians have demonstrated over the last 10 years is a real
strength and something that we should reflect on, appreciate and continue to
draw on. Of course “doing more with less” runs the risk of losing steam, but it
is nonetheless an asset. If managed wisely this will continue to be a strength,
although it is not an excuse to stop fighting for more.

Strength of Library is resilience;
capability and leadership that is increasingly evident on a global and
national platform e.g. taking lead on excellent provision of space, Open
Access and scholarly communications agenda.

Inherent interdisciplinary. Libraries sit
at the crossroads of every discipline, library and information science is
concerned with the skills and capabilities that cut across fields of study

Library space – potential and willingness
to adapt space to accommodate user demand for multi-function space, even though
this is happening very slowly it is moving in the right direction.

Unfortunately for the librarians and info
pros, a strength is actually being at a lower billing rate than an attorney or
other practitioner and the argument can be made that quality research can be
billed to a client to recoup overhead costs. It's the ultimate making lemonade
out of lemons, if you can't change the pay scale at least you can emphasise job
security to an organisation.

Well educated

Adaptable in a range of environments /
subjects

User Focused

Aware of Research and Research Processes

Brilliant Support and professional network

The main strength that I see with Public
Libraries is their place within the community and their ability to adapt to
that community. And I think that that versatility is mainly down to the staff
at the public counters. Their knowledge from the floor, in their dealings
with library users is invaluable. When things work well, the crucial
information that they collate in terms of what works, what doesn't and what
might work, in all kinds of different areas of the service, feeds up to those
setting strategies and can really influence the direction that the library
service takes.

One of the most promising strengths is the
ever growing skill set of librarians, especially in the area of services for
researchers in academic institutions - bibliometrics, etc.

Drive to understand the perspective
of the user.

More librarians getting out there and being
published and presenting. We can do more and have real research impact, aim for
the ISI journals.

The health (profile and get it done
attitude) of our libraries after the recession, we hunkered down and while we
had reduced budgets we latched on to the free (Social Media and online
promotion of collections) and the big issues (Publishing, Scholarly Comms) with
aplomb.

Our buildings are huge opportunities to do
more work with our communities – they are only busy really during semester time
and that means 3- 4 months a year when they are quiet. They can offer us great
potential.

Openness to change, a neutral and inclusive
service, passionate professionals who care about their work, a profession that
is not afraid to try new things and take risks

Social media acumen on the part of
librarians is a key strength at the moment in the library profession. Social
media commentary from a variety of sources is challenging the hierarchical
staffing structures of the library profession. Twitter for example has given a
strong voice to library personnel at all levels. Social media is also an
invaluable CPD tool and has also been harnessed to defend the library
profession in the wake of closures etc. (UK public library sector etc.)

The pre eminent strength of libraries is,
more often than not the staff and this tends to be a consistent feature
irrespective of type of library. I often think that people don’t realise how
much work goes into ensuring that a group of library staff remains engaged,
proactive and energised – and this effort is undertaken by all sides of this
equation; staff, management and so on. But everyone says ‘staff’ (don’t they?)
-so, I am going to riff on that slightly and say that a really interesting and
useful strength is actually ‘openness’ –both philosophically (libraries as
open, neutral, non-proscriptive spaces) but also by staff in terms of trying
new things, accommodating change and facing a consistently changing future.

A highly educated workforce, with a
‘learn-all’ rather than a ‘know-all’ attitude, willing to keep up-skilling
throughout their working lives.

Curiosity and imagination. I think without
these anyone in the profession is probably in the wrong profession but anyone
who has them will always be wondering what's coming next and have the
imagination to tether those possibilities to existing conundrums.

Willingness to reinvent ourselves

We as librarians see every threat as an
opportunity and every weakness as a chance to rebuild. That our ability to not
lose face in the ever changing environment around us, be it in employment,
budget cuts, or the ascent of digital culture. We as librarians have and always
will find a solution or a new way to address the problem and continue to grow,
adapt and change.

A strength that public libraries in
particular have is their community and how that particular community can come
together in solidarity and continue to show the value of their library is
amazing.

Weaknesses

Weaknesses are our modesty, we are so happy
to provide the best service imaginable, but rarely expect credit or
recognition.

Training which does not encourage
adventurousness & risk-taking.

Ineffectual and inward looking professional
body (In Ireland anyway)

No representation of many library
professionals

Tendency to work in silos

A snobbish and exclusionary tendency among

Poor at advocating

Poor at marketing

Cliched perception (by everyone) of what we
actually do

Cliched perception (by decision makers)
that we can be replaced by Google/Amazon

Not self-funded: (where does *your* library
budget come from)

The way we communicate our value is often
only marginally more effective than shouting into the void.

A perceived lag or tension between the rate
of innovation and the capacity of the Library to deliver the type of integrated
services staff, researchers, students want, where and when they want it.

Low on managers and leaders at senior
organisational and political decision making levels

(mis)perception of the library profession

Lack of media / communication skills in
profession

Perception of library / information
services as extra, not necessary

Over reliance on process

Hierarchy (in public organisations)

Persistent positioning as an Academic
Service rather than an Academic Unit in its own right. Losing out on the
opportunity to approach other academics as colleagues, because of the
structural disparity in the ways that libraries and librarians are treated in
the academic landscape.

The lack of a shared mission and vision for
librarianship in Ireland, and in particular for advocacy, is certainly a
weakness facing libraries. By shared, I mean a mission in which a diverse range
of those in the profession have participated in forming it and are therefore
invested in it. Although great at collaboration, more cooperation between
libraries would be a benefit, and solidarity across sectors could be improved
on. This is greatly hindered by not having an open and transparent forum in
which all in the profession can participate. Communication through official
channels is cumbersome and slow, and this is a source of frustration for many.

These continue to include parallel thinking
and a lack of cooperation between libraries of academic institutions. Issues
such as collaborative storage come to mind here.

Book ordering-the length of time it takes
from when a book is ordered to when it arrives on the shelves is far too long.

Decision making by senior management-
Senior management either makes poor decisions or delays making decisions for so
long that it has negative a negative impact on the services provided by the
library and on staff morale.

The support that the library service
receives from the community. Clearly people still value their library, and feel
that it's important that it keeps running

The association with books. Libraries have
never been about books, but information. However, if you say library=books when
books become less important, by implication, so do libraries. We need to break
that old assumption of what a library is.

Prioritisation: so much to be done
libraries often find making choice or dropping things difficult but time and
resources limited

The weakness that I see as being most
worrying at present is the way in which public library service indicators are
collected. This is hastening our demise, and not just in Ireland but also in
the UK. So much of what we do is just not counted. And so much of what we do is
very difficult to quantify. Return on Investment studies try to quantify the
value of the services that Public Libraries make available to communities using
cost-benefit analysis and these should be used widely because what is being
used at present is not accurate.

Too isolated- not integrated with other
professions or depts.

Lack of leadership- LAI Representative Body
but focused on CPD and Networking made up of volunteers

Too focused on helping without getting
credit- altruistic but also makes us invisible

Perceptions of redundancy. Users within an
organisation may not realize all what the library does and that puts the
library in a vulnerable position. It's the never ending saga of proving value
and demonstrating the LIS skill set. Companies may make decisions to cut
library and research functions if they can't see them and/or experience them.
Practice those elevator pitches and get in people's faces (in a good way!) to
let them know the expertise and services available. It needs to be a message on
repeat, the more they hear it - the greater chance of it sinking in.

Change is glacial.

Library staffing structures remain
excessively hierarchical and require review. As a profession we should
rigorously explore organisations where HR satisfaction scores are high and we
should emulate their flatter, team based approaches which are underpinned by a
culture of experimentation, blue sky thinking and innovation. 2. We do not have
a future libraries project nationally in one of our academic institutions. See
Futurelib project at Cambridge University (https://futurelib.wordpress.com/).
Such an initiative provides head space to contemplate and map out the future
direction of libraries which is key re securing the future of the library
profession itself.

Lack of visibility/voice outside our own
profession,

The first instinct again is to say
‘funding’ or ‘money’, and these are huge. You can however sometimes find a
creative solution and we have a tradition of surmounting financial limitations.
So I am going to go philosophical again and say ‘closed minds’. In almost any
library that you look at and admire for their creativity, and their innovation
there is probably twice as much that didn’t happen due to a closed mind or a
constrained vision. Understanding why this occurs is critical if we are to move
on both individually and collectively

Inward focus: Librarians seem to keep
talking among themselves, rather than reaching out to other professional
bodies, to government and to society at large. For this reason, the
contribution of libraries to social inclusion, education, health, cultural heritage
and many other issues continues to go unnoticed outside the profession.

The flip-side to this curiosity and
imagination is that we can become invested in too many things and spread
ourselves too far too thinly. How much do we have to be Star Trek (to explore
strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go
where no man has gone before)?

Lack of funding

Librarians are fighting for libraries today
more than ever. And I think one of the weakness may lie in us not showing off
more. Be it a qualified or unqualified librarian we all need to show off our
skills to the people, to show them we are more than what we are perceived as be
it a paper back book or a desk clerk. It is a profession a huge global group of
really highly skilled people. We need to teach others what we are capable of.

Opportunities

Opportunities in libraries are the growth
in need for library professionals in so many different sectors.

Where everything is in constant flux,
anything is possible and we can fill so many vacuums.

Chance to reinvigorate professional
body

Chance to be advocates for digital privacy

Chance to champion digital literacy

More inter-sectoral collaboration

Chance to be more entrepreneurial and
self-reliant

Better outreach

Librarians as educators

3D printers for all! Just kidding.
Opportunities are context-specific, they’re community specific. I can’t think
of one opportunity that would apply across all library contexts. It’s about
understanding the lifestyle of your community, discovering what they need
(which they can’t always tell you themselves) but which they don’t have, and
plugging that gap. For some, that might even be the kind of experimental
technology space typified by 3D printers; for others that would have no impact
at all.

CONUL’s growing profile and ability to
influence national policy.

Within a relatively small research and
academic community in Ireland we are in an excellent position to devise and
implement robust strategies for how our research outputs are made available.
Real progress is being made across Europe in terms of how institutions approach
Open Access, but we are also at a point where we can learn from some of their
stumbling blocks too. The recent news that the Irish Universities have
collectively become members of the Open Library of Humanities is heartening. We
need to maintain a momentum towards pursuing truly Open channels of research
dissemination, and work together with researchers to achieve an environment
where this is not just a priority, but the norm.

Tremendous opportunities to improve the
ability of scholars and the public alike to interact with each other and with
information through new models of publishing; new mechanisms of collecting,
storing, cataloguing, and disseminating information; and new modes of discovery
and use.

Increasing acceptance of need for lifelong
learning / need for information literacy all stages is changing

For LIS pros who aren't tech savvy, learn
more about technology. Think of ways to connect with your users on the
technology they use, or introduce them to new tech. For LIS pros already tech
savvy, learn more about security and the threats to a library's system. People
have perceptions of libraries being a relic. Show them how libraries are
current. Many libraries have already done this, so follow their lead and
examples.

The exploiting of unique and existing
library collections to showcase the potential for future donations. Also the
potential for more cooperation not only with library users and stakeholders but
also with local communities

The current highly visible concern
around the ethical necessity of open practice and publishing, and the financial
crisis in scholarly communication makes the fact that libraries are ideally
positioned, both in their history and in their orientation towards access and
dissemination, to play a vital role in the new present and future of scholarly
communication. The most innovative rooms discussing what scholarship looks like
and where it can live, and how people can find and use it, those rooms contain
librarians (among other people)

Research Data Management –the library seems
to be establishing itself as prime stakeholders in this area and it is adding a
new dimension to the service we provide. It also positions the library well at
college level.

The increasing amount of information
available. We can help our community by assisting them in understanding it,
finding it, validating it and using it. Our role should be to improve our
community, and this gives us a great 'in' to do just that.

The big opportunity for public libraries
now is to really sell their product. Many public library services have already
started to do this very well but not all. In most cases we are doing really
well in terms of the services that we run but selling requires a different
expertise than most library workers are used to. A shift in thinking is
required and also focused, expert training for library workers.

Because of strengths we can move into new
areas such as Research Data Management

We are involved in research and publishing-
need to do this on a more collaborative basis and with non library people

Engaging with our users (whomever and
wherever they are) is easier than ever

The recruitment embargo means we have an
ageing team in many of our academic libraries.

In addition, career progression
opportunities in academic libraries are so limited that we have a real
stagnation in terms of outlook, skill set and perhaps even in our ‘routines/habits’.

Having the same leadership in place before
and after the recession might be viewed as a good thing, steady hands that
guided us through but organisations need to look at how they are structured in
order to be ready for the threats ahead in higher ed.

Our customers are changing; more
international students, more mature students, more 4th level research students.
Are we ready for them? How can we get ready? What’s our mobility strategy?

We occupy a key gap between people and
communities, information and new technologies, and consequently as well-placed
to take ownership of new and emerging services and developments in this area
when nobody else often is, exploit and build links with libraries across
different sectors to learn from each other and to strengthen and unify the
library network and voice in Ireland

Open access journals published by
Libraries. Librarians have the skillset academically and technically to produce
high quality peer reviewed academic journals. This activity also enhances
engagement between academics and library staff. We should incorporate into
postgraduate library programmes modules such as Librarian as Publisher to
prepare graduates for what will be a growth area in terms of employment for
librarians in the future.

Librarians should consider applying to
research funds such as Horizon 2020. Traditionally we support academics who
apply to these research funds. Horizon 2020 requires a bid to have three
partners from three different countries. Librarians actively network across
geographic zones. Our work encompasses areas that are of interest re the
Horizon fund such as social exclusion, education, technology etc. Librarians
are ideally poised to win research income to fund continued innovation etc.

This varies depending on the type of
library, but the one common opportunity for us is that it is increasingly
possible to show tangible benefit from what libraries do. Linking our work to
impact will never show the breadth of relevance and benefit to our mission, but
it does speak to funders in a language they understand. And (for better or
worse!) it is possible to focus on the areas which resonate most with different
funding groups

Libraries could become central to the Open
Science agenda by putting the necessary infrastructure in place to support open
access and open research data, up to and including open access publishing.

I view libraries as being a slow-moving
river (with mass but it takes time to change direction) but those in them I see
as a giddy brook (jumping swiftly). I wish libraries could harness the energy
of those in them to react faster to changes

Collaboration with other academic/student
support champions

We have so many opportunities, the change
in how people are using libraries today is slowly changing how librarians work.
We are getting out from behind the desk, we are talking (loudly) to our
patrons, we are evolving and so are our libraries.

Threats

Threats are very evident in sectors that
are experiencing financial difficulty, mostly in the public sector, but some
academic institutions also. Unfortunately libraries usually take the biggest
hit, when economic cuts have to be made, and in particular it's the staff
and services that suffer, rather than the infrastructure.

Public perception is still that we only
stamp books and are obsolete as a result of Google. But as Neil Gaiman
says, Google can find you 100,000 answers - a librarian gets you the correct
one.

Valuable skills and innovation,
particularly technical skills, are at risk of being lost to emigration or other
sectors due to restrictions on hiring. As both public libraries and the entire
higher education sector continue to experience squeezed budgets, staffing
levels are reduced or stagnate, and innovation is at risk of being curtailed.

The Tories are systematically destroying
most good things, libraries included, and the ramifications of Brexit are going
to make this much worse for everyone in not just in the UK but with a knock-on
effect on Ireland too. When money is tight it always seems to be the
vulnerable, or the mechanisms that support the vulnerable, that get hit first.

Bad attitudes. There are so many threats to
chose from, but a bad LIS pro attitude will sink every strength and opportunity
- and will just contribute to a weakness. Be proactive. Be positive. Engaging
with users and other LIS people is a professional skill. You can work to
improve your public speaking and other engagement skills. You can go at your
own pace and make the adjustments you need to be successful at it, but being
quiet is no longer a librarian virtue, but a detriment to our profession. Go
out there and be positive and be loud.

Lack of strong professional body

Lack of positive representation in media
and public perception

Competition from commercial information
services

Lack of funding

Economic and political uncertainty

Isolationism (guilty of talking to
ourselves)

Technological bandwagon jumping

Failure to obtain adequate library budget
to meet user and institutional expectations due to inability or will to evolve
services so leading to third parties entering library ‘space’.

The Library tendency to wait to be invited
means that these important conversations have too many chances to bypass
libraries and librarians. It's crucial that people working within and on behalf
of libraries insert themselves in conversations, generate their own research
and perspectives, and connect explicitly with the work of other scholars in
other fields. Librarians talking amongst themselves will not change library
practice, and not change for the better the practices of academia generally

Financial constraints- but I guess that’s
the same for everyone.

The perception by students that everything
is available on Google.

Staffless services

Outdated unchecked assumptions as to what
libraries are and what librarians can do. It's up to us to change that, but I
think a lot of librarians want to keep the status quo; not all, but a fair
proportion.

Brexit – I see it as both an opportunity
and a threat Martin as it will bring greater numbers of students to our shores
but will we be able to meet all of their needs

Native ingenuity and ability to upskill and
respond will be again our strength in moving in to the 2020s.

Leadership training is predominately
offered to middle/senior library managers. Leadership should be a module in all
postgraduate library programmes to ensure that graduates have the skills to
strategically plan for but also defend the library professionally. We also need
more emerging leadership programmes like the one offered by the American
Library Association. http://www.ala.org/education careers/leadership/emerging
leaders Until a culture of leadership pervades all levels of librarianship
including library assistant, the profession is always vulnerable when closures
and cuts loom. 2. Not promoting our worth and skillset to organisations outside
of libraries is a threat re employment opportunities for librarians. Many
organisations could benefit from employing a librarian and don’t realise it.
Perhaps the Career Development Group of Ireland could engage with
non-traditional library employers in this regard via a seminar or a social
media campaign

Failure to continue to develop emerging
skills eg data mgt - if we don't others will provide this support to our users

Threats to future funding, replacement of
staff by automated services

The greatest threat facing Public Libraries
in Ireland is undoubtedly the advent of Staffless / 'Open' / 'My Open'
Libraries. This will change the very ethos of the public library and it will
turn what is currently a democratic space into one which is completely
undemocratic since it will exclude so many people. Yes, it is up and running in
Denmark but contrary to what we have been told, it was introduced there as a
result of public service reform - in 1996 there were 845 public library service
points & 57 book mobiles in Denmark. By 2013, 17 years on, there were 450
libraries and of these 180 were staffless. More have since opened.

So the number of libraries in Denmark
has almost halved. The staffless model was used there to keep libraries open.

This isn't about extending access for
Irish people. This is about setting up a system that will allow the
centralisation of library services to become formalized. Libraries in rural
towns will suffer most. In urban areas people can choose to avoid the staffless
regime due to greater staffed hours, and they have certainly been shown to do
this in the pilot project as the embarrassing usage figures indicate. But in
rural towns where libraries may only be staffed for a small number of hours per
week, library users will be forced to use this system even if they don't want
to. Librarians should be very wary of what they are being told about this
because so much of what has been reported can be shown to be false.

These continue to include perennial funding
issues, and the priorities of top brass which don't factor in the library.
Silo thinking by library staff and departments is still prevalent within
libraries as well.

Staffless Libraries

Not enough confidence

We only talk to ourselves... need outside
perspective

Other suppliers of information

Invisibility = Disposability

Libraries/librarians seen as becoming
irrelevant in a rapidly changing HE landscape.

The fact that we increasingly live in a
society where libraries are expected to justify not just their impact, but
their very existence. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this a real nadir
in civilised history and in conjunction with the wilful dismissal of learning
and expertise shown recently in some areas suggests that any group engaged in
teaching, fostering open minded enquiry and (critically) actively encouraging
an open society is going to struggle to continue to prosper.

By not communicating better what libraries
contribute to society, and the skills and expertise that librarians have, we
are in danger of seeming unnecessary or obsolete.

I think libraries are uncertain as to where
to situate themselves and how to keep current. If we don’t know who our
community is or what the needs of the community are, then how can we deliver to
meet those needs? As time progresses any potential community is used to
dismissing us because we lack relevancy.

Misperceptions of what a Library can offer
(by students and staff internal and external to the Library)

Money! But at the same time that doesn't
seem to be stopping libraries from rebuilding. Money is being found elsewhere,
through funding, grant schemes etc. Librarians are seeing the threats at every
corner, but they are also seeking the opportunities that lie elsewhere so our
profession, and our buildings can survive and flourish. More importantly so our
users do not lose the most important aspect society has.

And finally an answer to perhaps tie this
all together:

Libraries have huge, largely untapped,
potential to know more about their users and to be recognised experts on how
they read, learn, collaborate and communicate.

Instead we largely focus on pushing
services out to our users - resources, training, support - but we tend not to
get enough feedback. Every intersection with our users must be a two way
transaction. If we don't do this we will run out of fuel. This is impoverishing
us and it's a dead end.

Libraries already are sitting on an
abundance of data on their users which we to put to use: to share it, to
interpret it, to connect it to other data sets. A lot of our quantitative data
is rarely shared and our qualitative data, like the front desk staff’s years of
experience about what our users love or hate about our services, is too often
tacit knowledge never formally collected or shared.

Valuable intelligence can sit on a
librarian’s PC and if disseminated at all, might just be a bullet point
in an internal report.

We need to be systematic in collecting and
interpreting information about how our users work. But we have a professional
responsibility to do this ethically and transparently. This must be intrinsic
to our work at all levels. Not a side project we dip into at off peak times.